I'm trying to get the mysqlnd_ms (master_slave) plugin to run, but receive the error that the config file contains and unexpected bracket. To make sure I didn't corrupt anything, I replicated this error on a fresh install. Both installs are Ubuntu 12.04-LTS using the packaged PHP-5.3.10 and are running through Apache's module. Because the php5-dev package does not contain the headers for mysqlnd, I had to jump through some hoops to get PECL to install the package.

Are you enabling the extension? Look at the output of phpinfo().
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Mark WagnerMar 25 '13 at 20:48

@MarkWagner Yes, I do see it enabled from phpinfo(). In fact, if I comment out the extension, and associated settings, it still throws the error. Just having that config file in the conf.d directory throws it; moving it to my home directory clears the error. So there must be something about how the config file is formatted.
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Ken S.Mar 26 '13 at 13:41

Reducing the config file to just a single line with a pair of brackets still throws the same error. Only by making it an empty file am I able to clear the error; which, obviously, doesn't do me any good.
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Ken S.Mar 26 '13 at 13:48

Thanks. That is exactly what I had just found out. If I moved it outside of conf.d/ then it would work, but since I wanted to keep them logically grouped together, I left it in the same directory but changed the extension from .ini to .cnf and now PHP does not try to parse it and everything works.
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Ken S.Mar 26 '13 at 19:50